As Seen on ABC's "Good Morning America"!

First Posted on Talk.Origins Newsgroup, April 1, 1998; Published the Next Day, in NMSR Reports, Vol. 4, No. 4, April
1998

Alabama Legislature Lays Siege to
Pi

By April Holiday

The Associalized Press

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this
high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state
legislature narrowly passed a law yesterday [March 30, 1998]
redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace
industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was
introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and
rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of
the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Guy Hunt
says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.

The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It
would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually
uses pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile
Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi
(p) is a Greek letter that
signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama,
said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be
changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational
number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after
the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she
said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as
many more digits as you have time to calculate".

"I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational,
and it is time for them to admit it," said Lawson. "The Bible very
clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon's Temple
was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was
round in compass."

Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that
cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the
exact answer could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to
some absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that
the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty
cubits. Period."

Science supports Lawson, explains Russell Humbleys, a propulsion
technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center who testified in
support of the bill before the legislature in Montgomery on Monday.
"Pi is merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry." Humbleys is working
on a theory which he says will prove that pi is determined by the
geometry of three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists
to be "isotropic", or the same in all directions.

"There are other geometries, and pi is different in every one of
them," says Humbleys. Scientists have arbitrarily assumed that space
is Euclidean, he says. He points out that a circle drawn on a
spherical surface has a different value for the ratio of
circumference to diameter. "Anyone with a compass, flexible ruler,
and globe can see for themselves," suggests Humbleys, "its not
exactly rocket science."

Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to
support the bill, agrees. He said that pi is nothing more than an
assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to
argue against the bill. "These nabobs waltzed into the capital with
an arrogance that was breathtaking," Learned said. "Their prefatorial
deficit resulted in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to
the legislature's puissance."

Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect
the way math is taught to Alabama's children. One member of the state
school board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of pi into
the state's math textbooks, but thinks that the old value should be
retained as an alternative. She said, "As far as I am concerned, the
value of pi is only a theory, and we should be open to all
interpretations." She looks forward to students having the freedom to
decide for themselves what value pi should have.

Robert S. Dietz, a professor at Arizona State University who has
followed the controversy, wrote that this is not the first time a
state legislature has attempted to redefine the value of pi. A
legislator in the state of Indiana unsuccessfully attempted to have
that state set the value of pi to three. According to Dietz, the
lawmaker was exasperated by the calculations of a mathematician who
carried pi to four hundred decimal places and still could not achieve
a rational number.

Many experts are warning that this is just the beginning of a
national battle over pi between traditional values supporters and the
technical elite. Solomon Society member Lawson agrees. "We just want
to return pi to its traditional value," he said, "which, according to
the Bible, is three."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/279/april/fool.htm

Note: Correspondent April Holiday is not related to "Wonder Why"
columnist April Holladay.

NMSR Reports, Vol. 4, No. 6, June
1998

Pi are not squared...Pi was a
hoax!

By Dave Thomas

Our little "Alabama Legislature mandates pi=3" April Fool's story
(NMSR Reports, April 1998, May 1998) is still going strong! On April
1st, I posted an April Fools news story by Mark Boslough on
talk.origins. But, as the story was forwarded from person to person,
all of our deliberate hoax hints were deleted. The article has since
traveled across the globe. I plastered last month's
confession/explanation all over the 'Net -- a dozen newsgroups in
all. But, due to a poor choice of title, it appears to have simply
gotten lost in the wild and woolly Weird World Web. I named the post
"NM Physicists create artificial life on the Web." I could have
re-posted under a better title (such as "WE WROTE ALABAMA PI!!!"),
but why spoil the fun? Anyone tracking the source by searching for
"Alabama pi" will see the "NM Physicists..." articles, and can learn
the facts for themselves. Anyway, the new urban legend lives on, and
is propagating to new groups like alt.conspiracy and alt.callahans
(the latter named after Spider Robinson's classic "Callahan's
Crosstime Saloon" series).

A mutated version worked its way back to us on
May 27th, 1998, via a UNM physics
professor. This version has undergone several mutations, and some
of these appear to be adaptations for survival. Governor Guy Hunt was
mutated into Governor Fob James (the current Alabama governor);
Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from
University of Alabama, was mutated into Prof. Homer
Carlisle; and state school board
member Lily Ponja evolved into Judy Aull.

UPDATE: MEMETIC MUTATIONS COME FORWARD

On July 12, 2002, Prof. Homer Carlisle (the realProf.
Homer Carlisle, an associate professor at Auburn
University in the department of Computer Science and Software
Engineering) and Judy Aull (the realJudy
Aull, an undergraduate student advisor in this department)
e-mailed me, Dave Thomas, and informed me that the students who
"mutated" the Alabama Pi legend were probably from their own
department at Auburn University, which happens to be in Alabama.
Thanks to the internet, we now know some of the precise memetic
mechanisms involved in the evolution of this prank.

The following two pieces show how the irrepressible Pi prank has
been mentioned by the AP, and by German news. Ladies and
gentlemen...we have a new Urban Legend.

Rest Easy! Pi Is Not Changing!

MAY 07, 15:47 EDT

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) -- Did the Alabama Legislature really pass a
bill to redefine the mathematical value of pi, changing it from 3.14
to 3? If you believe what you read on the Internet, it did. A
seriously written story making the rounds through cyberspace
describes how NASA engineers in Huntsville are upset about the
proposed change, as are college professors.

But Alabama students need not quit using 3.14 when finding the
area of a circle.

Pi isn't changing in Alabama.

The story is a hoax.

But it has been relayed by Internet users all over the country. It
ended up on a Huntsville radio station and prompted calls to The
Huntsville Times. Brian Hanson, data systems manager for the
Legislature, said he received a call Wednesday from a Chicago radio
station inquiring about the legislation. He said he had no idea how
the story originated. The first giveaway that the story is a hoax is
that it says Gov. Guy Hunt plans to sign the legislation. He hasn't
been governor since 1993. And the purported sponsor of the
legislation, Rep. Leonard Lee Lawson, R-Crossville, doesn't
exist.

The story also includes criticism from University of Alabama
professor Kim Johanson about the Legislature trying to change a
mathematical constant.

Math professors at Alabama say they've never heard of Johanson,
but they've heard plenty about the Internet story. "We had a good
time with it," said professor Martyn Dickson, who said the math
department received the story from someone at Purdue University.
Katie Clark of the Purdue Life Sciences Library said she received the
story from science librarian Richard Funkhouser, who read it on a
Yale University posting, which had received the story from a Hawaii
address. "No, I didn't write it," said Liz Bryson, an official with
the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Organization in Honolulu. "We've
had a lot of fun with it, though."

She said she'd heard the story was an April Fool's joke-one that
apparently wouldn't die.

Funkhouser noted that the Indiana House of Representatives once
tried to legislate the value of pi, but the Senate let the bill die
after Purdue math professor C.A. Waldo explained the idiocy of
putting pi into Indiana law.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet
(http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com), John Fleck has offered the
following crude translation. Be sure to check out the rudimentary but
informative translation capabilities of Babelfish!

April jokes live longer

Munich (PC WORLD) - thanks of the Internets live April jokes
longer than usual. Since weeks geistert the message by the electronic
media, the State of Alabama wants the value of the number of pi
legally on 3 to determine, instead of the " accurate " value of
3,1415926535... The text contains statements of NASA engineers and
professors and works so genuinly that even newspapers and radiosender
already inquired in Alabama about the details. From where the message
comes, nobody knows. Richard Funkhouser, librarian at the Yale
university, points out that it gave actually once the attempt to
determine the value of pi legally: in Indiana, in the year 1897.
(C)Copyright IDG of magazines publishing house 1998

p = 4

by John Geohegan

As a general rule, I've learned that most people don't like the
same books and movies that I do, so I hesitate to make
recommendations because the odds are against me. Here's a different
type of recommendation; check out from your local library one of the
two recent books by William Dunham, The Mathematical Universe and
Journey Through Genius, then decide if maybe you'd like to own one of
them for occasional browsing. I find them very entertaining books
consisting of short essays about mathematical proofs and
personalities, but not the sort of book I want to read straight
through.

In The Mathematical Universe, which consists of 26 essays, A
through Z, the third essay, "Circle" includes a story similar to the
April Fool story in NMSR Reports, but a little more serious. In 1897,
the following bill was passed by the Indiana House of Representatives
and then by the Senate Committee on Temperance; "Be it enacted by the
General Assembly of the state of Indiana, That it has been found that
a circular area is equal to the square on a line equal to the
quadrant of the circumference." This means that if you construct a
square with each side equal to one fourth of a circle's
circumference, the square and circle will have equal areas, which can
be true only if pi equals 4! The bill was derailed mostly through the
efforts of Purdue mathematician C. A. Waldo, who declined an offer to
meet with the bill's author, saying that he was acquainted with as
many crazy people as he cared to know!